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Interaction Rituals and Social Distancing': New Haptic Trajectories and Touching From A Distance in The Time of COVID-19
Interaction Rituals and Social Distancing': New Haptic Trajectories and Touching From A Distance in The Time of COVID-19
Discourse Studies
2020, Vol. 22(4) 418–440
Interaction rituals and ! The Author(s) 2020
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‘social distancing’: New sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/1461445620928213
haptic trajectories and journals.sagepub.com/home/dis
Julia Katila
Tampere University, Finland
Yumei Gan
The Chinese University of Hong Kong, China
Marjorie H Goodwin
University of California, Los Angeles, USA
Abstract
Previous research in the social sciences has shown that haptic interaction rituals are critical for
maintaining social relationships. However, during the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, ‘social
distancing’ was encouraged in order to avoid the spread of disease. Drawing on data from self-
ethnography as well as publicly available resources, in this study we explore some new, locally
negotiated haptic trajectories to accomplish interaction rituals in the time of coronavirus. First,
we present self-ethnographic observations of distancing in face-to-face encounters from our
everyday lives. Second, utilizing methods of microanalysis of naturally occurring interaction, we
investigate video recordings of the embodied negotiation of space and touch among politicians.
We analyze three different ways in which politicians negotiate transitional moves in this haptic
ritual when one party initiates a handshake: repairing, declining and apologizing. Our analysis
shows that politicians adapt their entire bodies in conjunction with talk, gestures and laughter not
only to accomplish the greeting but also to remedy the potentially face-threatening situation of
not getting the greeting right. This research has implications for better understanding the
Corresponding author:
Yumei Gan, Department of Sociology, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Office 424, Sino building, Shatin,
Hong Kong SAR, China.
Email: yumei.gan@link.cuhk.edu.hk
Katila et al. 419
spontaneous ability of human beings to invent new ways of engaging with each other. Moreover, it
adds to our knowledge of how the materiality of human bodies can impact forms of sociality.
Keywords
COVID-19, embodiment, greetings, haptic interaction rituals, social interaction, touch
Introduction
The coronavirus (COVID-19) disease pandemic that has spread across the world
has extensively influenced the life of the human species. Not only causing death,
sorrow and fear, and a major economic crisis, it has also led to reorganizing the
structures of society. For example, institutions have had to restructure the division
of labor, families have had to manage new forms of child care and schools are
trying out different forms of education.
Importantly, this pandemic has clearly influenced our social habits, disrupted
our schedules and changed the forms and quantity of our social encounters.
Evident in phrases such as ‘social distancing’, ‘quarantine’ and ‘shelter in place’,
which appear in the media, we have witnessed a natural experiment, where basic
forms of human sociality have been extensively altered by a sudden change: the
pandemic.
The ways in which people engage with each other, especially through touch and
other bodily rituals, have suddenly become carefully restricted so that bodies do not
get contaminated by the virus. In the present report, we examine some novel prac-
tices and embodied choreographies for performing interaction rituals in the time of
coronavirus, which are tailored and creatively designed to respond to restrictions
and orders to practice forms of ‘social distancing’. Our analysis is divided into two
sections. First, we provide self-ethnographic examples of changes in organization of
space in face-to-face encounters in Westside neighborhoods of Los Angeles.
Second, we focus on the transition from haptic practices which involve changing
from using the palms of the hands (handshaking) to now using less intimate body
parts, elbows (elbow-bumps), among a specific group of people – politicians.
Highlighting our bodies’ materiality and vulnerability, touch (Montagu, 1986)
and close interaction, crucial to our health and well-being, have become potentially
dangerous to us. In touch, our bodies become momentarily intertwined, sensing
and being sensed (Merleau-Ponty, 1968, 2003). In addition to resonating effects
and embodied meanings, this intercorporeal connection can also result in the
leaking of unwanted materials from one body to another: viruses and bacteria.
Unlike machines, the human body is a living creature (Parviainen et al., 2019), and
therefore can also get sick and die. Previous interaction studies have rarely
highlighted the influence of the material vulnerability of our bodies – that they
can, for instance, catch disease – for our basic forms of human sociality.
420 Discourse Studies 22(4)
a type of speech in which ties of union are created by a mere exchange of words [. . .]
They fulfil a social function and that is their principal aim, they are neither the result
of intellectual reflection, nor do they necessarily arouse reflection in the listener [. . .]
Each utterance is an act serving the direct aim of binding hearer to speaker by a tie of
some social sentiment or other. Once more, language appears to us not as an instru-
ment of reflection but as a mode of action.
From Malinowski’s (1936 [1923]: 313) perspective, greetings provide ways of tying
people together through ‘social sentiment’. Rather than being used for explicit
information exchange, they instead function to maintain and negotiate
422 Discourse Studies 22(4)
social relationships (Duranti, 1992; Enfield, 2009; Hillewaert, 2016; Kendon, 1986:
247–248).
Rituals such as salutations and farewells mark the transition of either increased
or decreased access to another (Goffman, 1971: 79). M.H. Goodwin and Cekaite
(2018) have examined how such access rituals are performed at the boundaries of
activities within American and Swedish families (p. 136). ‘Boundary intertwinings’
(Goodwin and Cekaite, 2018: 136) are practices designed with an eye to the intimacy
and nature of the relationship, hugs and kisses being especially salient (Goodwin
and Cekaite, 2018: 121–183). If touch is not available, forms of distant intimacy are
practiced among family members, who may adopt ‘kissing gestures’ – aural and
visual equivalents to the tactile kiss – to greet or say goodbye through videocalls
(Gan et al., 2020). In public and less intimate settings, handshakes are routinely used
to initiate, manifest and renew social relationships, as a form of greeting and meet-
ing another person (Duranti, 1992; Hillewaert, 2016; Kendon, 1986).
Failing to greet another person appropriately may have direct consequences for
our embodied relationships. This becomes pivotal in the time of coronavirus, as
our habitualized interaction rituals were suddenly restricted in order to prevent the
spread of the virus. While touch between close family members was still allowed,
this restriction majorly influenced the haptic practices between intimate relation-
ships outside of the closest family circle.
Methodological background
This study adopts the view that social life and forms of sociality are fundamentally
embodied, material and intercorporeal – an understanding developed by Merleau-
Ponty from Husserl’s earlier work, and referring to a view of human bodies
and meaning-making as carnally intersubjective and constituted by their material
relations and interactions with each other (Meyer et al., 2017: xvi, Merleau-Ponty,
1968, 2003).
The term intercorporeality thus refers to the co-experienced and embodied
nature of human sociality. Merleau-Ponty (1968) famously used the example of
one hand touching another one to talk about this sensorial coexistence: when
hands of a same body touch, they can catch each other and themselves touching
and being touched – sensing and being sensed – at the same time (Merleau-Ponty,
1968: 141, 263). Merleau-Ponty (1968) also suggests that something similar is hap-
pening between different bodies:
Now why would this generality, which constitutes the unity of my body, not open it to
other bodies? The handshake too is reversible; I can feel myself touched as well [. . .]
Why would not the synergy exist among different organisms, if it is possible within
each? (p. 142)
Touching of hands exemplifies quite well the reversibility of bodies and the bodies
catching each other sensing and being sensed. However, intercorporeality means
Katila et al. 423
much more than just touch. It is a way of seeing the emergence of human behavior,
perception and affect in fundamental unison, which is incorporated by the multi-
sensorial coexistence of bodies.
Informed by Merleau-Ponty (1968, 2003), this article. aims to explore the
embodied, material and corporeal aspects of sociality. Moreover, exemplified
well in practices such as handshaking, intercorporeal forms of sociality equally
entail ritualized, habitualized and semiotic aspects. We are constituted through our
interpersonal relationships, actualized in everyday, ritualized interaction practices.
We therefore focus on the experienced as well as semiotic (Goodwin, 2000; 2018)
manifestations of human sociality.
We use microanalysis of video-recorded interactions as a method to capture
forms of intercorporeal sociality (Goodwin, 2018; Goodwin and Cekaite, 2018;
Streeck et al., 2011). Microanalytic methods aim at uncovering the communicative,
affective and experienced aspects of interaction to view how these aspects are
manifested in participants’ body movements and orientations, such as in their
verbal, facial and gestural expressions (Goodwin, 2018; Goodwin et al., 2012).
In this study, we ask how people manage avoiding habitualized interaction rituals
while still maintaining their relationships when they are encouraged to avoid touch
and bodily contact.
The data for this study are drawn from our self-ethnographic observations
conducted during the outbreak of COVID-19 in Los Angeles, California, as well
as public video resources online dealing with political meetings in several different
countries: the United States, the Netherlands and Germany. The meetings include
politicians’ speeches, news conferences and formal encounters. We made a collec-
tion of instances where politicians touch (or intend to touch) each other and exam-
ine in detail how the parties accomplish their social relationships while performing
social distancing.
Analysis
Self-ethnographic observations during the time of COVID-19
During the time of the pandemic, with the demands of social distancing, people
around the world needed to collaboratively re-evaluative what it means for bodies
to be ‘together’ (Goffman, 1971: 19). Given that this virus is shown to be spread
through close contact and via respiratory droplets produced when people cough or
sneeze, neither skin-to-skin touch between people nor self-touching (e.g. an un-
washed hand touching one’s face) is encouraged in order to avoid the spread of
disease. This difficult time clearly threatens the cherished traditions of being con-
nected with others through close bodily proximity and physical contact.
Despite the restrictions, we found that people creatively adjusted to a new
reality and found solutions in order to sustain relationships with each other.
While we noticed a tendency to avoid close contact through actions such as the
hug, the importance of still seeing the other person’s face, either online or face to
424 Discourse Studies 22(4)
face, became of crucial importance. For instance, drawing from Gan and Katila’s
own experiences, we witnessed ourselves in an encounter where we could have
exchanged supplies without seeing each other, but wanted to meet face to face
and greet each other from a window (Figure 1, 17 March 2020 on the West side of
Los Angeles, when mandatory face-covering was not yet effective).
When greeting each other face to face, we were prohibited from doing what we
would have ordinarily done: hugged each other. Furthermore, the spatial organi-
zation and distance between us had radically changed. We met at the boundary of
two spaces – the house and outdoors – and were more physically distant from each
other than in our previous encounters. However, we were able to participate in
intercorporeal co-presence – experiencing and being experienced by each other
through visual and aural means in a same ‘common vivid present’ (Schütz, 1962:
219–220). Thus, even if we could not touch, we were able to greet each other at the
same time – touch from a distance –with the multisensorial richness of face-to-face
interaction (through the intonation in our voices, gestures, body postures, facial
expressions and more).
Figure 1. Greeting and exchanging materials through a window without coming into close
physical proximity of each other.
Source: Photos taken by Y. M. Gan and J. Katila.
Katila et al. 425
While the details of our everyday observations are limited to the specific con-
texts and life situations we experienced, they allow us to understand something
some general about the dynamic and creative ability of human beings to replace
well-worn interaction practices with new ones, in different ecological contexts.
The materiality of human bodies – the facts that we are living tissues and can,
for instance, catch disease and contaminate others – creates environmental restric-
tions and niches through and within which the manifestations of human sociality
unfold in creative directions.
In what follows, we will turn our analytic attention from mundane encounters
TO high-stakes political settings. Despite these special times, politicians still
needed to meet face to face and manage the interaction rituals of greeting while
showing an executive governmental-level example of doing social distancing to
citizens. Importantly, when presenting themselves in public space, politicians are
not only accountable to one another at the level of their own personal relation-
ships; they also represent the citizens of their countries and are responsible for
maintaining good relationships between heads of state. We present a microanalysis
of naturally occurring instances of how politicians negotiated types of interaction
rituals, whether handshaking or elbow-bump, without touch through intercorpor-
eally orchestrated negotiations of bodies.
Figure 3. Trump corrects his manner of handshaking (frame grabs extracted from video on
whitehouse.gov).
Next Trump provides a positive evaluation (‘Okay, I like that. That’s good’)
while adjusting the microphone to initiate a new action sequence (line 12 and
Figure 3(d)). He is producing this verbal utterance with a light smile, which ret-
rospectively colors the action with lightheartedness (see Kaukomaa et al., 2015).
Katila et al. 429
Declining touching
In Figure 4 (from The Guardian, 3 March 2020, see Appendix I), we illustrate an
example where one party noticeably avoids conducting a handshake greeting. In
this example, the German Chancellor Angela Merkel walks toward her seat to sit
next to the interior minister, Horst Seehofer. Merkel extends her hand to Seehofer
while she approaches him.
In Figure 4(a), Merkel enters the room and approaches her seat, which is next to
Seehofer. Before Merkel comes within sight of Seehofer, but is not yet visible to
Seehofer (Kendon and Ferber, 1973), she already glances at Seehofer and starts to
prepare her hand (Figure 4(b)). When she enters within reachable distance of
Seehofer, she twists her body into a facing formation with Seehofer and extends
her hand toward him (Figure 4(c)).
Simultaneously, Seehofer responds to Merkel’s gaze wearing an apologetic
expression on his face, but does not reciprocate Merkel’s haptic initiative
(Figure 4(c)). Instead, while producing his response with a relevant body part –
his hand – he declines touching Merkel by forming a rejecting hand gesture (Figure
4(d)). This action not only appears in a mismatching position for handshaking
(palm of the hand facing downward) but also with a mismatching hand (his left
hand, while Merkel had initiated the handshaking with her right hand). However,
while clearly abandoning the projected handshake, Seehofer’s hand gesture toward
Merkel still displays from a distance the relevance of the handshake (Figure 4(d)).
In addition, he applies a slightly embarrassed facial expression, with his left shoul-
der slightly pushed back. Through this posture, he is acknowledging the face-
threatening side of refusing to touch. As a response to Seehofer’s posture,
Merkel suddenly steps away (Figure 4(e)), with a ‘surrendering’ open body gesture
with hands to the side. Furthermore, her face and mouth are open wide as in an
expression of surprise. In synchrony with Merkel’s stepping-away movement,
Seehofer changes posture in his chair; his body moves more toward Merkel,
while his mouth slightly mirrors Merkel’s mouth opening, though his shoulders
remain in an embarrassed, lowered position (Figure 4(e)). Therefore, in this
moment, the bodies move simultaneously in opposite directions, but still remain
in a facing formation, wearing opposite but complementary body postures;
Merkel’s body is ‘open’, while Seehofer’s is ‘closed’. By co-participating in each
other’s body movement and postures in this manner, Merkel and Seehofer collab-
oratively recognize the awkwardness of ‘failing’ to greet appropriately and perform
facework.
430 Discourse Studies 22(4)
Figure 4. Seehofer rejects shaking hands with Merkel (frame grabs used with permission from
The Guardian).
Katila et al. 431
At the same time, it is possible to hear that overhearers not visible in the camera
co-participate affectively in the encounter, laminating the action with laughter
(Figures 4(e) to (g)). This reconstructs the face-threatening situation as an event
that invites laughter, thus attending to the delicacy of the situation and upgrading
interpersonal intimacy (Goffman, 1955; Jefferson et al., 1987; Katila and Philipsen,
in press). Moreover, after Merkel’s embarrassed and surprised posture in Figure
4(e), the woman next to Merkel as well as Seehofer shift into smiling facial expres-
sions (Figure 4(f)), collaboratively shaping the affective atmosphere as humorous.
Furthermore, in Figure 4(f), the woman gazes at Seehofer, while taking hold of
and ‘shaking’ her own hand. Through this self-touch greeting to Seehofer, she
brings to the fore the saliency of hands and touch by providing a form of embodied
meta-commentary on what is being laughed about. At the same time (Figure 4(f)),
Merkel raises the palm of her hand facing Seehofer, while lowering her gaze down
and away, her body gestalt (Mondada, 2014: 140) commenting on the necessity of
halting the action of handshaking while providing a type of a wave gesture to greet
from a distance.
Merkel then, in Figure 4(g), enters back into a facing formation with Seehofer
to monitor his reactions to her gesture. They smile and look at each other to
reconcile, while the woman, positioned between Merkel and Seehofer, produces
a cross gesture with her hands, which concretely conveys that handshaking is
forbidden. Her combined gestures signal a rejection of the activity of handshaking
while collapsing into laughter. In a next move, in Figure 4(h), Merkel once more
upgrades her remedial actions by walking toward Seehofer and putting both of her
hands up to display that handshaking must stop. At the same time, she explicitly
states, ‘That is the right thing to do’ (Figure 4(h)). The action is co-participated in
by Seehofer with both a smile and mutual gaze, but he is not putting any more
corporeal effort into the action – his body tacitly communicating about his inabil-
ity to touch by ceasing the movement of his hands.
This encounter happens in the time of coronavirus when the number of con-
firmed cases had risen in Germany. Seehofer’s non-compliance with Merkel’s ges-
ture would have been treated as a violation of the interaction ritual for greeting
and a face-threatening act on his part in another time. Given the current situation
Merkel is the one who produces a number of facework actions to reconcile and
account for initiating the handshaking. However, it is not only Merkel who pro-
duces the remedial work. Seehofer participates in her apologetic bodily behavior
by providing moment-by-moment complementary body movement in synch with
Merkel’s gestures, bodily postures and movement. Moreover, the potential embar-
rassment influences all co-present, and we can witness how overhearing
co-participants partake in reformulating the emotional atmosphere from collabo-
rative embarrassment to laughable.
This segment yet again shows how greeting rituals are essential for maintaining
and renewing social bonds: not only those who directly participate in the greeting
but also those who are publicly seen to evidence the greeting. Given that the
occasion is performed by politicians, video-recorded and seen by a wider public,
432 Discourse Studies 22(4)
the importance of the remedial action becomes salient in a special way. When not
successful, interaction rituals can even become pivotal sources for damaging the
social relationship, if necessary remedial work is not done (Goffman, 1971).
However, in Figure 4 and others, we have also witnessed how humans creatively
come up with spontaneous bodily trajectories and alternative ways of ‘touching
from distance’ to secure their social relationships. This is evidenced in the spon-
taneous and synchronized body gestures of Merkel and Seehofer, which make
publicly available the saliency and relevance of touch, alongside the remedial
work done by the woman next to Seehofer and Merkel, and co-laughter of other
participants. Hand-gestures, together with laugher, bodily postures and facial
expressions, can therefore become crucial forms of intercorporeal connection
from a distance, functioning to remedy face-threatening social situations.
Figure 5. Mark Rutte apologizes for shaking Jaap van Dissel’s hand (frame grabs used with
permission from the RTL Nieuws).
434 Discourse Studies 22(4)
to happen with minimal commitment (Figure 5(d)). Rutte does that one thing that
he is not supposed to do in the time of corona – touches van Dissel even more.
While engaged in this haptic formation, both Rutte and van Dissel wear embar-
rassed facial expressions (Heath, 1988), avoiding direct mutual gaze while lami-
nating the action with awkward smiles which seek to remedy the insult. As has
been shown in the context of family interactions (Goodwin, 2017; Goodwin and
Cekaite, 2018), touch can be important for reconciling ‘insults’ in relationship
practices. Moreover, these tactile practices for maintaining social bonds are so
deeply rooted that they are prioritized over ‘following the rules’ of hygiene and
health, even in this high-stakes situation.
The touching does not end here. Rutte tries to grasp van Dissel’s elbow, perhaps
already trying to choreograph an elbow-bump posture (Figure 5(e)); however, van
Dissel then takes hold of Rutte’s elbow and lightly pushes it away (Figure 5(f)). In
Figures 5(e) and (f), Rutte is laminating the action with vocal meta-commentary (‘Oh
NO! NO! OVER! OVER! OVER!’) while glancing toward the audience a couple of
times and managing the awkwardness of the situation with laughter, much like we
saw in Figure 4 as well. The bodies negotiate the aboutness of the situation and their
embodied postures through haptic actions; together their body movements attempt to
engage in a shared rhythm. The bodies assemble themselves into an elbow-bump
posture, which is performed toward the audience. Moreover, due to the special cor-
poreal design of our hands and elbows on the ‘sides’ of our bodies, an elbow-bump is
also harder to produce than a handshake with bodies facing directly each other.
Rutte and van Dissel in Figure 5(h) walk way ‘together’ (Goffman, 1971: 19), in
a haptic formation (Figure 3(i)). With a friendly tap on van Dissel’s shoulder
(Figure 5(j)), Rutte (in Figures 5(h) to (j)) ‘shepherds’ (Cekaite, 2010) van Dissel
from the stage. In politics as well as in family interaction (Goodwin and Cekaite,
2018), such moves provide visible displays of who has the power to physically
guide the other into a new social space. Thus, the relationships of participants
are once again reconfigured. Interestingly, without the need for haptic negotiation
of new practices and having to reconciliate the habitualized practice, the two
would not have walked together away from the scene in an intimate formation
like we witness here. In one way, the shared experience brought the bodies closer,
instantiated by the highly performative nature of the encounter.
Humans, as other primates, utilize touch in moments of reconciliation for social
relationships (de Waal and van Roosmalen, 1979). These social relationships are
not only consequential for the individuals but also for entire nations, as heads of
state are stand-ins or representatives of entire nations. In this respect, following the
rules of social distancing appears to take second place of maintaining social
relationships.
Discussion
Garfinkel’s (1967) ethnomethodological perspective attempted to make the famil-
iar ‘seen but unnoticed’ (p. 36) visible and to find ways to talk about familiar
Katila et al. 435
things. His famous breaching experiments were designed to violate the commonly
accepted social norms to seek people’s reactions. In the time of coronavirus, the
world became a locus for natural breaching experiments as all of a sudden the
everyday lives and familiar interaction practices of people around the world were
disrupted by the virus, and people needed to creatively come up with new ways of
interacting and maintaining their social relationships. Moreover, the ‘seen but
unnoticed’ importance of taken-for-granted practices like haptic interactional rit-
uals became suddenly salient in a special way.
In this article, we discussed some distinctive features of human sociality in the
time of coronavirus. In addition to describing some instances from our everyday
life observations, we analyzed in detail three different naturally occurring cases
where politicians negotiated their haptic interaction rituals. When one party initi-
ated a conventional form of handshaking, we found that the other party could
repair the handshaking initiation by initiating a less intimate manner of greeting
(Figure 3), decline touching (Figure 4) or apologize for touching the other (Figure
5). Most importantly, our cases revealed that when a violation of the social dis-
tancing rule occurred, remedial work for maintaining each other’s face and social
relationships was critical. We found that politicians adapted their whole bodies,
alongside with talk, gestures and laughter not only to accomplish the greeting but
also to remedy the potentially face-threatening situation of not getting the greeting
right. What is more, not only the parties involved in the greeting but also others
co-present who were publicly seen to witness the violation, participated affectively
in the shared emotion, remedying embarrassment with laughter, smiling facial
expressions and gestures, which reformulated the face-threatening awkwardness
as a ‘laughable’ (Goffman, 1955; Jefferson et al., 1987). Accordingly, moments of
embodied negotiations over relationship rituals between politicians involved
onlookers as well as principals; all co-present parties in the shared intercorporeal
space participated in the affective frame through their embodied actions.
By describing in detail, the transformations in habitual forms of haptic rituals,
our study contributes to our understanding of the influence of our bodies with
respect to the materiality of interactional practices. We are living bodies, and we
can contaminate others through disease; when our safety is threatened, this influ-
ences the trajectories of our ordinary interaction routines. However, our cases also
provide evidence that we are, in a very primordial sense, social beings. For exam-
ple, our analysis shows that in the most face-threatening moments when a violation
occurred, reconciliation seemed to take priority over the physical distancing rules
(see Figure 5).
In the process of writing this article, the situation with the coronavirus has been
constantly developing. Our cases involving politicians represented a time (March
2020) at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States, Holland
and Germany, and the restrictions for interaction rituals such as greetings and
face-coverings have become even more strict ever since, even among politicians.
While being unable to capture the whole timeline of the coronavirus, and having
examined only a few selective cases, our analysis sheds light on the creativity of
436 Discourse Studies 22(4)
Acknowledgements
We highly appreciate Guardian News & Media Ltd and RTL Nieuws for giving us permission
to use their materials. We moreover thank members of the Kenter Canyon hiking group for
letting us use their images. We also wish to thank Asta Cekaite for her valuable comments
on an earlier version of this article. This manuscript was completed when Julia Katila was a
Visiting Postdoctoral Researcher (Post-Doc Pooli/Emil Aaltonen Foundation) and Yumei
Gan was a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at the Center for Language, Interaction and Culture
(CLIC) at the University of California, Los Angeles (2019-2020).
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication
of this article.
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Author biographies
Julia Katila is a postdoctoral scholar from the Faculty of Social Sciences, Tampere University.
She has a background in social psychology and has done work in the fields of affect studies,
ethnomethodology, phenomenology and interaction research. Her main area of interest is in
microanalytic studies of multisensorial and intercorporeal forms of human sociality, and her
current research focuses on the intersections between affect and touch in health care
encounters.
Yumei Gan is a PhD candidate at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. She is also a
Fulbright Scholar at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), for the year of
2019–2020. Her research examines intimate family relationships in the context of migration.
Her focus is on video analysis, ethnomethodology and conversation analysis.
440 Discourse Studies 22(4)
Appendix 1
Data sources
The pictures used in the transcription (in Figures 3, 4, and 5) are frame grabs from
videos published in the following sources.
Figure 5: Mark Rutte apologizes for shaking Jaap van Dissel’s hand
Frame grabs were used with permission from the RTL Nieuws.
‘Sorry! Sorry! Oeps: Rutte schudt hand na afkondigen handenschudverbod’,
RTL Nieuws, 9 March 2020.
URL: https://www.rtlnieuws.nl/nieuws/video/video/5050092/oeps-rutte-sch
udt-hand-na-afkondigen-handenschudverbod